Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

On Wednesday, the Spaniards worked themselves up into a frenzy of fear. Chimalpahin remembered: “It was very dark because of clouds, and it rained, and it cannot be found out who went shouting all around the city of Mexico—was it not some mischievous Spanish youth?—shouting to people and going about saying at the corners of houses everywhere that the blacks had arrived, that they were not far away, that everyone should get equipped for fighting…. All night the Spaniards did not sleep and kept vigil.”23 Years later, a Spaniard, not wanting to blame a practical jokester, would say it was some roving pigs that had first frightened someone and generated the initial alarm.24 Be that as it may, Chimalpahin couldn’t help laughing. “We indigenous were not at all frightened by it but were just looking and listening, just marveling at how the Spaniards were being destroyed by their fear and didn’t appear as such great warriors [after all].”